I N T R O D U C T I O N ᪿ From Bad to Worse MURRAY POMERANCE That this book was originally conceived and contracted prior to Septem- ber 11, 2001 has become virtually impossible, even for me, to believe. Since then the invocation of malevolence in political and social life and in our pop- ular cultural fictions has seemed to mushroom, to have spread everywhere, and it is understandable how any discussion of the proliferation of negativity onscreen might be thought inspired by those horrendous events or aimed in response to them. Former Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder’s comment September 13, 2001 to ABC, “They are evil in a way that we rarely see in the history of this world,” sounds a currently prevailing sentiment, and also echoes and prefigures what has become a standard presidential litany about “Them”—the Taliban, the Palestinians, the Israelis, the Iraqis, the mailers of anthrax, the corrupt CEOs of billion-dollar conglomerates—being “Evil.” But even in the Golden Age before that Turning Point in History—as popular rhetoric is leading us to think of it—the screen had already shifted from a place where conventional dramatic unfoldings were staged with regu- lar use of conflict and a lurking villain, to an unheralded new topos where—as the subtitle of this volume suggests—infamy, darkness, evil, and slime resided casually and everywhere as the stuff of the everyday. This book does not pre- tend to be the history of cinema we would need for showing in detail the long line of thieves, rapists, varmints, codgers, dodgers, manipulators, exploiters, conmen, killers, vamps, liars, demons, cold-blooded maniacs, and warm- hearted flakes that populated cinematic narrative from its earliest days around © 2004 State University of1 New York Press, Albany 2 MURRAY POMERANCE 1907 onward or for arranging in some sensible order the questioned (and sometimes questionable) screen morality of the precode era; the broad range of dramatic negativity before, during, and soon after World War II (ranging from Rhett Butler’s potty mouth through the offscreen torture and murder of the unctuous Bugati in Casablanca [1942] through the arrogant murder in Rope [1948]); the disintegrating social mores of the 1950s; the chilling and vicious political tactics of the 1960s; the institutional horrors that began to appear in a systematic way in the 1970s (Watergate and beyond); and the new visions of all these, as well as depictions of disconnected personality and fragmented community, that became a screen staple after 1980. This book does, however, intend to present a sketch, as it were, of the range of badness that filmgoers around the world have become accustomed to seeing on the screen and to give some hints as to where screen evil came from and how it functions as a staple of our film diet today. By the turn of the twenty-first century it had become virtually unthinkable to see a film entirely without a moment of egregious— typically fantastic—violence, destruction, immorality, threat, or torture. A man swallowed whole, on camera, by a mammoth shark (Jaws [1975]); a beheading, on camera, followed immediately by a shot of one of the observers biting off, and swallowing, his own tongue (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence [1983]); a psychotic slasher murder (Psycho [1960]); a crucifixion (The Last Temptation of Christ [1988]); a man being presented with his wife’s head in a hatbox (Se7en [1995]); a metallic insect alien with three drooling mouths popping bloodily out of the chest cavity of a gentle man (Alien [1979]); an astronaut exploding inside a space suit when his helmet cracks (Outland [1981]); humans tortured by having hideous hungry vermiformities given leave to slither into their orifices (Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan [1982], The Matrix [1999]); a man being devoured by a giant reptile while he sits on the toilet (Jurassic Park [1993]); crowds of innocents butchered by military swordplay or gunfire (Doctor Zhivago [1965]); a group of apparent innocents butchered by gunfire (Three Days of the Condor [1975]); a crowd of mercenar- ies butchered by gunfire (Commando [1985]); people shot in the head (Star- dust Memories [1980], Traffic [2000], The Prince of the City [1981], Dog Day Afternoon [1975], GoodFellas [1990]); date rape (Saturday Night Fever [1977], Bully [2001]); dental rape (Marathon Man [1976]); ravaging by dogs (The Boys from Brazil [1978]); death by ice pick at the back of the neck (GoodFellas [1990]); accidental electrocution (The Ice Storm [1997]); intentional electro- cution (Goldfinger [1964]); dis-arming (Satyricon [1969], The Empire Strikes Back [1980], Total Recall [1990]); malevolent bisection (The Phantom Menace [1999], Black Hawk Down [2001]); diabolical explosions (Darkman [1990], Swordfish [2001], Blown Away [1994], The Sum of All Fears [2002]); casual planetary vaporization (Men in Black II [2002]); being dropped into a pool of piranhas (You Only Live Twice [1967]); being tossed from a building (The © 2004 State University of New York Press, Albany INTRODUCTION 3 Man Who Fell to Earth [1976]); slow death by poison (The Bride Wore Black [1967]); quick death by poison (Gosford Park [2001]); being secretly impreg- nated (The Astronaut’s Wife [1999]); being brainwashed (The Manchurian Candidate [1962])... all this hardly constitutes even the tip of the iceberg. Speaking of icebergs, how about being shackled to a steam pipe in a ship that is sinking because it has struck the tip of an iceberg, or slowly freezing to death in the icy waters of the Atlantic soon afterward (Titanic [1997])? Con- sider the library of films showing, even centrally turning on, deliberate, bru- tal, full-frontal scenes of public execution—The Green Mile (1999), for exam- ple, or I Want To Live! (1958), In Cold Blood (1967), Daniel (1983), Tom Horn (1980), and Dead Man Walking (1995). Recall putrescent bodies, exploding bodies, bullets to the eye, castrations, rapes brutal (The Accused [1988]) and under sedation (Kids [1995]), embezzlement, fraud, class warfare, diabolical possession, gay bashing, wife bashing, child bashing, racial and ethnic vio- lence, wanton destruction, cannibalism... not to mention mental torture, sadism, humiliation, the myriad ways of producing social death. This is now the materiel out of which shots—very often close-ups—are constructed, so that we have increasingly, for the last thirty years, been coming face to face with a vision of conflict and decay that had heretofore been scarcely imagin- able in such detail, suggested and implied rather than directly shown. Nor does badness, in life and onscreen, invariably and inevitably bleed, suppurate, and grimace. Out of the shiniest skyscraper, to be sure, the shiniest villainy can routinely emerge, if not to butcher or devour then to exploit, enslave, and politically terrorize. That evil is very often linked to dirt should caution us to search for it, too, in cleanliness. For an example of the contrast between “old” and “new” screen malevo- lence, examine the difference between the circumferential way rape is treated by John Ford in The Searchers (1956)—John Wayne riding into a gully looking for Pippa Scott and forbidding Harry Carey Jr. to come with him, then show- ing up a little later without his coat and saying quietly, with a certain cold look in his eye (“When I looked up at Duke during [the first] rehearsal,” remem- bered Harry Carey Jr., “it was into the meanest and coldest eyes I have ever seen” [Eyman 1999, 444]) that he found her and covered her with his coat and buried her—and the on-camera shot near the end of Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) where Leo Fitzpatrick finds Chloë Sevigny stoned unconscious on a sofa at a party, deftly removes her panties, gently spreads her legs and penetrates her (giving her AIDS) while she sleeps and we hermetically observe. More is at play in this contrast than just the demise of the Production Code in 1964. When The Searchers was being filmed, the frankness of Kids and its civilian abuse was inconceivable onscreen. Consider, too, the difference between the military killing on Omaha Beach in Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One (1980)— dangerous, tactical, strategic, adventuresome, individualistic, frightening—or © 2004 State University of New York Press, Albany 4 MURRAY POMERANCE in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) or Verhoeven’s even more graphic Starship Troopers (1997), in both of which thousands of young men are chewed up in a moment, the precise equivalent of cannon fodder, yet in shots graphic enough to reveal gore, dismemberment, and agony up close, one body part at a time. Or note the relatively antiseptic mob shootings in Some Like It Hot (1959), the camera modestly turning away from the slaughter in the garage; and the graphic drive-by and casual brutality in Falling Down (1993); the off- screen murders in Key Largo (1948) or the onscreen ones in Scorsese’s Good- Fellas (1990). In the 1960s, screen torture lasted a couple of minutes—the laser creeping into James Bond’s crotch in Goldfinger (1964)—but by Mission Impos- sible II (2000) it is extended to last through the last two thirds of the film, as Thandie Newton is injected with an explosive that will rip her apart unless Tom Cruise solves the riddle and finds her in time. The reader will no doubt recollect hundreds of examples to better these. Even if such an achievement were possible it would not be the intention of this book to make a neat catalog of the many kinds of film and the many kinds of filmic treatment that make for what might now, fashionably, be called “bad” film—that is, popular and pleasurable screen presentation of evil, nefariousness, monstrosity, darkness, negativity, slime, and the uncouth.